Theater has often served as a touchstone for critical moments of political change or national definition. Steve Wilmer selects key historical moments in American history to examine the theater's response. The selected events range from the Colonial fight for independence through Native American struggles, the Socialist Worker play and the Civil Rights Movement, to those of the last decade. Wilmer also considers audience reception and critical response.

S. E. Wilmner is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and formerly Director of the School of Drama. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the faculty of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies, in Finland. Steven Wilmer is editor of Portraits of Courage: Plays by Finish Women (Helsinki University Press, 1997) and of Beckett in Dublin (Lilliput, 1992), among other works. He is also a playwright, with his works performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Lincoln Center.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. From British colony to independent nation: refashioning identity; 2. Federalist and Democratic Republican theatre: partisan drama in nationalist trappings; 3. Independence for whom? American Indians and the Ghost Dance; 4. The role of workers in the nation: the Paterson Strike Pageant; 5. Staging social rebellion in the 1960s; 6. Reconfiguring patriarchy: suffragette and feminist plays; 7. Imaging and deconstructing the multicultural nation in the 1990s; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.